McClatchy Sale Could Spell End of A Bitter Newspaper War

By: Each day for the past 28 years, the Times Leader and The Citizens' Voice have fought each other for scoops and respect. Their rivalry - bitter, intense and personal - is among the fiercest in newspaperdom.

But Wilkes-Barre's status as the smallest city in the United States with two competing, paid dailies may not last much longer.

The Times Leader, published since 1879, has been put up for sale. A potential buyer is the parent company of the Citizens' Voice, which could shutter it.

Speculation in both newsrooms has raged since March 13, when the Times Leader's owner, Knight Ridder Inc., announced it had agreed to be sold to rival McClatchy Co. for $4.5 billion in cash and stock. McClatchy immediately put 12 of the Knight Ridder papers up for sale, including the Times Leader, saying it didn't meet the company's growth criteria.

A shutdown of the Times Leader would be an extraordinary twist of fate, considering that the tabloid Citizens' Voice was started in 1978 by striking Times Leader workers and was never expected to outlast its older, bigger competition.

Jerry Kishbaugh, a Voice editor and one of the paper's founders, said he would welcome the Times Leader's demise. "Then they would get a taste of what we went through," he said.

To understand the rivalry between the two papers, consider the open letter that Times Leader Editor Matt Golas and Managing Editor Dave Iseman wrote to McClatchy's CEO, Gary Pruitt, shortly after the paper was put on the auction block.

"Yo Gary," Golas and Iseman wrote: "Remember the fight scene in 'The Quiet Man' between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen? The tooth-spitting, roundhouse-throwing brawl that crawls all over the Irish countryside for what seems like forever? That's what journalism is like here in Wilkes-Barre."

The daily brawl has its roots in one of the most virulent newspaper strikes in U.S. history, which began Oct. 6, 1978, when more than 200 Times Leader employees walked off the job to protest what they saw as union-busting tactics by the paper's new owner, New York-based Capital Cities Communications.

Anticipating a strike, Capital Cities erected a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire, brought in replacement workers and hired the Wackenhut agency to provide security. Undeterred, pickets smashed the Times Leader's windows, cut gas lines into the building, slashed the tires of delivery trucks and employee vehicles, screamed "scab" and spat in the faces of the replacement employees, and splattered the building's facade with paint bombs. Violent clashes broke out between strikers and the Wackenhuts, and one guard was severely beaten.

Yet the strikers had the support of many, if not most, of the residents of this blue-collar, pro-union coal town of 40,000 about 100 miles north of Philadelphia.

Virtually overnight, the Times Leader's circulation plummeted by more than 50 percent, advertisers fled to the Citizens' Voice, and newsstands refused to sell the "scab" paper. Forced to stop publication for nearly a week, the Times Leader complained that police, who were sympathetic to the unions, did nothing while its building and workers came under attack.

While calm eventually was restored, only a few of the strikers ever returned to work at the Times Leader. All four unions were decertified, making the paper a nonunion shop for the first time in decades. The Times Leader rebuilt its circulation, eventually topping the Citizens' Voice in readership and advertising revenue.

But if Cap Cities could claim victory, so could the strikers. The Voice, intended to be a strike paper that would shut down as soon as the labor dispute ended, had established itself as a viable alternative.

Much of the bitterness has faded as the original players either died, retired or moved on; the Scranton-based media conglomerate Times-Shamrock bought the Voice in 2000 and the Times Leader has changed hands multiple times. But the battle for scoops, readers and ad dollars is as intense as ever.

Reporters work hard to break stories and take it hard when they get beat; columnists and editorial writers take potshots at one another.

If anything, the impending sale of the Times Leader has sharpened elbows.

Golas, who became the Times Leader's editor last year after 20 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer, has repeatedly flogged the Voice as a "lapdog" while touting his own paper as the "watchdog." A recent Times Leader editorial declared that if the paper is sold to Times-Shamrock, "the Times Leader's dogged, aggressive coverage could be replaced with a single newspaper laced with the Voice's weak, permissive tone."

For its part, the Voice ran an editorial that slammed the Times Leader as a paper engaged in "destroying the reputations of others under the cloak of good journalism."

"The scars here are pretty pronounced after all these years," said Citizens' Voice Editor Larry Holeva, who joined the paper last year from the Scranton Times-Tribune, another Times-Shamrock property.

Both papers, however, have been relatively straightforward in their news coverage of the sale, with Holeva and Golas telling their reporters to play it down the middle. Of course, both would dearly love to be the first to report the identity of the buyer.

"I think both newsrooms will have to get it the old-fashioned way," Golas said. "I'm not counting on any gifts."

Several companies have an expressed an interest in the Times Leader, but industry analysts view Times-Shamrock as a logical suitor.

Voice Publisher Scott Lynett, whose family owns Times-Shamrock, would not say whether the Scranton-based company had made a bid, but said: "We are always interested in growth opportunities in our business."

With the Times Leader facing an uncertain future, the newsroom has indulged in a bit of gallows humor. On a whiteboard in the conference room, there's a list of fake story ideas that include: "Shamrock - tool of the occult?", "Evil Garys through history" (a reference to the McClatchy CEO) and "McClatchy's community involvement and other urban legends."

Iseman, the Times Leader managing editor, said there's no point in obsessing over the sale.

"At one point, I said, 'Let's just do the damn job.' What sense is there of discussing this to death and letting it pull us away from our work?"